Q&A: Killing a Humanoid
Killing a Humanoid
Question
Hello Rabbi, a somewhat fictional question:
There are two fictional cases involving a humanoid that is killed/murdered:
1) The Golem of Prague (I assume you know it)
2) A film called The Prestige. The plot matters less, but there is some fictional invention by Nikola Tesla there that can duplicate anything, down to the atomic level, and also at the level of brain cells and memory. Someone there duplicates himself, and each time the duplicated character (or the original, it is hard to know—the duplicated man himself says he never knows who will drown and who will remain, because the last existing memory is that of the final character who stayed alive, and the memory accumulates) is killed by drowning.
My question: is killing such a creature considered murder? (If so, then according to the story, would the Maharal be considered the murderer of the golem, since he caused it to return to its original form?)
Is there a difference in the answers because of the difference between the way the golem was created as I described it and Tesla’s imaginary machine?
Answer
I didn’t understand the situation, but in my opinion a human being is not a collection of molecules, so the question does not even get off the ground.
Discussion on Answer
“Secular people” is not a label for a distinct group of views and opinions. Secular people are simply “non-religious.”
When you say “they would claim there is no soul,” you mean materialists, and they in fact do claim that we are a collection of particles. If there is something beyond physics—we would call that a soul.
Rabbi Michi is explaining to you that there is no way to answer the question, because consciousness is not a collection of particles. Your question is based on a mistaken premise—that consciousness can be duplicated by copying the particles in the brain. Therefore it cannot be answered.
You could answer as follows:
The assumptions and definitions in the question are mistaken, but if we ignore how the thing happened, and before us stands an entity with consciousness, it is forbidden to kill it.
As for the golem, it is just a story, but even in the stories it was… well, a golem… a human-like machine. Such a machine has no moral status.
I too support him. Every word is spot on.
I’ll try to explain a bit:
The Golem of Prague was created, according to the fictional story, from sand and through some Kabbalistic act by which the Maharal breathed into it a kind of life-spirit.
If a person were to kill this golem, would he be charged with murder?
Would it have been permitted for the Maharal to kill such a creature after it was created (to take away the life-spirit that was within it)?
In the second case, the machine, whose mode of operation is unclear, creates an exact duplicate down to the level of the consciousness of the body on which it acts (inanimate, living, speaking).
Obviously a human being is not a collection of particles; that is indeed how we perceive things, and so do secular people too, although they would claim there is no soul.
But also in the case of the golem, and also in the case of the film in question, the person who is created was not created in the usual way of egg and sperm (and soul).
My question is on the halakhic level, not on the moral level.
As you taught us, there is a moral aspect by which murder is forbidden (as we learned from the story of Cain and Abel), and there is also the Torah prohibition of “You shall not murder,” which was added for us at Mount Sinai.
It is completely clear to me that it would be forbidden to kill the people (creatures?) in my description on the moral level.
But does one also violate “You shall not murder” here?